Broken Dancer, Shattered Dreams
by Rosetintstheworld
Summary: Rachel Harrington (known to all as Red) led a perfectly charmed life before the...incident. However, the night before she's due to head off to the city in order to fulfil her childhood dream, that all changes. Her life was wonderful, but a man named Butch Cavendish destroyed it all in one fell swoop. And she hated him with every fiber of her being for it...


She came to, and the room was as dark as the world outside - she guessed it was gone midnight; probably later. An orange speck of a light glowed from a cigarette end halfway across the room, and the lights shining from the windows of the bars and the lamps outside offered some visibility, but still very little. Her first realisation was her pain; her second was that she lay in a puddle.

Her head ached dully somewhere behind her right temple, and her face was damp and unpleasantly syrupy with half-coagulated blood. All was well apart from that, at least to the extend of her knowledge, until one got below her waist. Starting somewhere mid-thigh, her right leg burned with a sharp agony, like her skin was being pierced with 10,000 white-hot needles. Shit...her audition was in a week and a half - her things packed, she was to be New York-bound in the morning - and this could only spell bad news. She couldn't remember a damned thing - perhaps she'd been practising or something, and had tripped - maybe she'd hit her head on her night-stand and knocked herself out, twisting her leg in the process. That seemed reasonable.

Only problem being, the hard, unfinished wood of the floor below her was certainly not that of her bedroom. And where in the name of God was all that _blood_ \- and that cigarette light - coming from?

Experimentally, she curled the roes of her right foot; they were pretty much fine - sore, sure, but what did she expect? At least for now, her leg didn't seem to be broken; every cloud and all that jazz, but this was still a fairly poxy silver lining. She propped herself up on her elbow, massaging her forehead with the heel of her other hand. There was a graze easily the size of her palm on her temple, extending down to her cheekbone, oozing blood stickily down the side of her head. Strains of her red hair had broken free from her braid, falling about her face in ratty tangles dragged through gore, dishevelled and almost dreadlocked in places. Her hair tangled so easily - she hated it. Her arms were bare - she'd been sure that she'd been fully-clothed earlier, and she didn't recall-

"Finally...Mornin', sleepin' beauty," a strange male voice crooned, gravelly and broad in his accent. The cigarette light stood up and moved towards her; his gait was odd and wide as he strutted like some sort of gunslinger, his heels clumping against the ground. It was then that she began to pick out facial features in the hazy half-light. He stood six feet tall at least, his upper lip pulled up in a permanent scowl by a deep, mottled red scar. Several others that were much the same - deep and unpleasantly dappled red - criss-crossed his face; some new, many much older. His hair was long and lank, black like a Native's; he possessed that same hooked beak of a nose, too - however it was as clear as day that he was a white man nonetheless, even if he did have the face and tresses of a savage.

"Who are you?...Why are you in my house?..."  
"Darlin', this ain't your house," he stated simply.  
"Who...Are...You?" she said again, drawing her words out and speaking slowly as if to a child. Maybe he was simple; yeah, he just hand't understood her. Chances were she'd taken a tumble on the street, and some village idiot had attempted to come to her aid. That explained a lot more than her initial theory.  
"None of your concern," he drawled, grinning as he picked his teeth with one long, dirt-speckled fingernail. Bending down, he outed his cigarette by gringing it against her bare arm. She inhaled sharply, moaning with the pain through her gritted teeth. What the fuck? What was he doing? She attempted to voice her anger and shock, but a strangled groan was all she could muster. "Y'know, lil' missy, I never asked your name of you 'neither."  
"Fuck off," she growled, indignant, her pain making her defensive. She clutched her arm; the burn was to the muscled area of her upper arm, and it was deep, too. The smell of her own burnt flesh turned her stomach.

Bending her fingers back with such a force he would have broken them, had she not pulled away, making her whimper like a puppy in the process, he plunged one filthy thumbnail into her wound. She hissed again, tears dampening her eyes. "The mouth on it!" He gasped sarcastically, sneering. "Listen missy, I don't take kindly to being talked back to."  
"Rachel Harrington..." she blurted out, her voice wracked by hollow sobs. Her fear had now overpowered any other emotion which she felt, so compliance was now her only option. "...Folks call me Red..."  
"Well well well, Miss Red, it's a pleasure," he shifted from his haunches to his knees by her side. She was frozen stiff, no clue what he was planning to do to her. Starting by her temple, which incurred another raw burst of pain, he ran his hand almost tenderly down her face. She shrunk into herself, revolted by his touch, and by the filth which seemed to linger over every inch of him. "Please don't hurt me again, mister...I'm sorry..." she whimpered in the voice of a child, shuddering.

What he did next shocked her more; truthfully, she'd have preferred a second cigarette burn, or a kick round the head. Caressing her face until his fingers dripped with her blood, he opened his ruined mouth to reveal unpleasantly yellowed teeth, and ran his tongue to and fro along his dribbling hand, claret running off his lips. Red shuddered, her entire body trembling. This was disgusting and wrong...she was petrified.  
"What have you done to me?" her voice was pathetic; shaking like a leaf, and barely there. She was sweating like a whore in church as his face drew closer to her own, his nose twitching as he breathed in her scent. Taking one final, long inhalation - his nose perhaps a quarter-inch from the wound in her head - he stood up and leaned against the wall to her right. "Why don't you see for yourself?"

Her hands shaking, Red looked down on hersekf; she wore only her bustier and petticoats; her dress, shoes, stockings, jewelerry, and even her drawers were gone - she noted this last point with mounting horror. Her skirts were sopping wet, and the dark pool which surrounded her was growing steadily, seeping from around her right side. Her lip quivering, she pulled back the soaked layers of cotton and lace, and...

Her stomach heaved, and her hand went to her mouth, though no vomit came out. She'd moved it for Christ's sake; she'd felt her toes press against the ball of her foot, and her muscles clench and tighten...thus was a bad dream, surely...surely it wasn't real...

Either her brain or her eyes were lying to her. For a right leg was no longer a thing which she possessed; no, it ended perhaps a little more than three and a half inches before her hip, only the slightest stump of her thigh remaining. She continued to dry-retch, tears streaming down her face like rainfall. It was too _real_ to be her imagination; she could see the layers of skin and fat; the sinews of her severed muscle. Her thigh bone was a splintered mess; shattered white peaks like a mountain range drenched in blood. Oh, the _blood..._ it seeped from some places, and outright poured from others...Hell, she had lost a good three pints of the stuff already...she was _dying_ ; she was sure of it...  
"It didn't taste nearly as good as your pussy," he grinned savagely as he lit another cigarette.  
"What do you..." before the sentence was even fully said, she realised exactly what he had meant, and this gave her cause to heave and sob once more. Not only had he abducted her and beaten her unconscious, but he had... _taken advantage_ of her, and...oh dear Lord, the thought of what he had done to - with - her leg was too disgusting to even comprehend, let alone think about. She was so ludicrously grateful for the amnesia...

"M-Mister, please...I think I'm _dying_ \- I need a doctor..."  
"You were a good little fuck, too," he continued, paying no heed to her whimpering. "'Course, I'da liked it better if you'da quit screamin', but I can't complain. 'S why I didn't kill ya."  
"You're a _monster_..." she cried softly, her voice hardly even a whisper. "I was savin' myself..."  
"You ain't spent yet..." He stood up, swift as a hawk, and straddled her waist, holding her hands down as he did so. She screamed as he gripped her wrists above her head in one hand, dropping his pants with the other. "Quit your hollerin'; you'll wake the neighbours." He was already stiff as he pulled her skirts up towards her breasts. Lashing out with her hands and remaining leg, she screamed like she had never screamed before; biting, spitting, scratching, kicking; doing whatever she could to get him off. Though her blood loss had made her weak, her years of religiously practising and rehearsing her dancing every day of her life had made her strong and supple, and her terror had finally started to manifest itself as something useful; it had given her fire, and she fought against him tooth and nail, completely out of her skin, with every iota of strength she could muster. She kicked and punched, making impact in his stomach and groin, though also the thin air; she spat in his face and raked her nails down his cheeks and arms, leaving red welts in their place; snapping her teeth at or around any part of him that came close enough to her.  
"Fuck off...Get offa me, you sonofabitch...Go away..."

As his attempts to shut her up and spread her legs - leg - apart became fruitless, he seized a hank of hair at the front of her head in a black rage, and knocked her head thrice against the hard wood floor so hard that she room began to spin, and her eyes grew hazy. He stood up indignantly, pulling his pants back over his erect member. "You're such a pretty lil' thing, but you cuss like a sailor and fight like a man...'Snot how to win over a feller at all." He kicked her, his foot making impact right in her bloody stump as she frantically tried to preserve what little dignity she had left, pulling her skirt back over her twat. She howled again, the pain bringing about fresh tears and making her retch again - this time something came out, and she barely had time to turn her head to the side to vomit on the bare floorboards rather than herself. It still dragged through her hair and coated her face, the stink of it bringing fresh tears to her eyes. The man laughed as he watched her convulse in her own stinking mess, drinking in her suffering with his eyes, taking a long drag on his cigarette.

"P-please just tell me your name..." Red sobbed, the indignity and the pain and the sheer unadulterated terror turning her thoughts to slurry and her speech to jargon.

"Butch Cavendish, ma'am," he tipped his hat to her as he walked to the door with that same arrogant gunslinger strut as before. "Pleasure to make your acquaintance." He tipped his hat to her, before sauntering out and bolting the door from the outside, trapping her in.

It was clear that his plan had been to leave her to bleed to her death. She would have done, too; however, a passerby on the street had heard her cries and come to her aid. She'd been taken to her home; a doctor had been called by her distraught mother; he'd cauterised her wound and saved her from a death by blood loss, but there was clearly nothing he could do to save her leg, given that it had been amputated and eaten by Butch Cavendish, nor was there any way to rid her of the memories which she retained for years and years after. Her life was a miserable wreck, and so it continued to be for what seemed like a lifetime as she sat in her bedroom, reduced to an invalid, her long skirts hiding her stump. It sickened her to look at, really. She'd been only seventeen years of age.

She was not long eighteen when she gave birth to her bastard eight and a half months later. She'd tried everything to kill it as her stomach swelled, but the thing wouldn't fucking die. After spending seventeen hours alone, in a pain so tremendous she hadn't felt anything like it since the...incident, and once she'd held it in her arms and seen its face, she hadn't either the heart nor the energy to smother it.

She'd wrapped it in a blanket and spend the next day and a half hobbling on her crutch the eight and a half miles to the nearest poor-house, and dumped it there on the doorstep. She hadn't left a note or anything; she'd placed it on the ground in its wrappings, and walked away without looking back; ignoring its cries and gurgles. She'd barely had a night of sleep since giving birth to the thing; the fatigue had nearly killed her.

She thought that it had been a girl, though she couldn't rightly say. She never named it. If she had named it, she would have grown attached to it, and she couldn't risk endearing herself to her rapist's child.

Butch Cavendish had ruined her life. Her audition for the ballet company in the big city had never happened; her career had been left in bloody tatters before it had even begun; she'd risked her life trying to kill his spawn as it grew inside of her, between starving herself, and the ever-tightening corsets; then again as she delivered it herself on the floor of her bathroom. She never married; never bore another child; her later career had somehow taken a turn towards brothel madam, and it made her feel like shit to watch unwashed creeps feeling up her girls like they were their property. She herself never found pleasure in the arms of a man, or indeed truly knew the loving of one.

And all so the bastard didn't miss out on a meal.


End file.
